Russian filmmaker Vadim Perelman makes his feature-film debut with the psychological drama House of Sand and Fog, based on the novel by Andre Dubus III. Ben Kingsley plays Massoud Amir Behrani, an Iranian immigrant living the United States. Even though he was a high-ranking official in Iran, he works several menial jobs in order to provide his wife, Nadi (Shohreh Aghdashloo), and his son, Esmail (Jonathan Ahdout), with an apartment in California. He buys a California bungalow, thinking he can
fix it up, sell it again, and make enough money to send Esmail to college. However, the house is the legal property of former drug addict Kathy (Jennifer Connelly). After losing the house in an unfair legal dispute with the county, she is left with nowhere to go. Wanting her house back, she hires a lawyer (Frances Fisher) and befriends a police officer (Ron Eldard). Neither Kathy nor Behrani have broken the law, so they find themselves involved in a difficult moral dilemma. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi
If this movie isn't quite the contempo-Greek tragedy it wants to be, it's still a powerful, almost unforgettable meditation on fate, cultural collision and the morality of renovating a house that isn't really yours.
Meticulously acted and unafraid of a difficult subject, House of Sand and Fog resonates with a quality that can be vital to art -- a lack of moral rectitude.
House of Sand and Fog doesn't deliver on the gut level of contest, and neither does it offer any other terms in which it does deliver for the audience.
A lack of empathetic characters cripples this poorly paced but well acted drama about an Iranian family who purchase a city-auctioned bungalow in Northern California after its former tenant has been unjustly evicted.
The dramatic scheme is to show how two people ... intersect "tragically," but what we see is a group of characters who act as wrongheadedly and intransigently as imaginable.
"I have taken us so far off our course, but now it is time to return. It is time for us to go home to our destiny."There are no good or bad characters in House of Sand and Fog. Just a lot of flawed individuals who seem to unintentionally make matters worse at every turn. This isn't a feel-good movie, to say the
least.The story is about a conflict over a house that is very important to several different people. The woman that it originally belongs to is wrongfully evicted from it, and it ends up being sold to an exiled Iranian man who needs the house as part of a plan to provide for his family. An unimaginable amount of conflict and tragedy ends up resulting from this unfortunate situation.I'm an avowed fan of these kinds of dour dramas. House of Sand and Fog has all the emotional power of a movie like Revolutionary Road or Little Children, without the heavy-handed preachiness of Crash. This movie isn't trying to teach you anything or tug on your heartstrings, it's just a well-told story about tragedy. Combine that with solid writing, a good score, and a great cast (lead by Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley), and you have a movie that is a fine example of the drama genre.
An extremely powerful film. Kingsley gives a performance that should be up with the bests of all-time, where Connelly, strikingly beautiful, gives an Oscar-worth one as well. A deep story that is rich in characterization as well as with things such as material possessions and how much we place value in them. A heck of
a depressing story with people who are extremely troubled and have very few redeeming qualities, but in the end it really makes you take a strong look on how much you place value on items, such as a simple house, and the effects these possessions can have on your life.
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